Okay, so my whole “I’m going to post ever day in August” pretty much failed. By the time I stopped updating I just didn’t have the time- I was working a lot more and had to fit in get togethers with friends before I came back to college, college shopping, blahblahblah, actually moving into college, the first week of classes. Just a lot. So I do apologize, mostly because there were a lot of comments that piled up to be approved (or spammed, there were quite a few of those too sadly).
But in any case, school is going great. I’m thinking this semester is going to be fun. On Tuesday my roommate and bestie (Nikki!), went to Yoga, which was so much fun. I wanted to go last semester but I always had class or something around the time and couldn’t go. This year, however, I definitely plan on going every week. The instructor was very nice, and there were a few other fatter girls (myself included), and she would sometimes say something like “it’s okay if your hands don’t reach the floor” or something that was referring to the issue of just having a bigger body. So I was really happy about that. I was initially worried about going because I wasn’t sure what kind of environment it would be, but I’m very glad I did now. Had a wonderful time and felt great afterwords.
There were a few comments that I wanted to address (now that I have finally gotten a chance to go through some of them).
omg you are so confident, i wish i was more like you, and also im about the same size as you, but i have stretch marks, you are so lucky that you dont have any!
I do actually have stretch marks- most of them on my stomach area. This is the only picture I really have of them, but maybe in the future I’ll do a special stretch marks feature!
Another comment on some commments:
You are not obese in those photos, you are a beautiful woman. Any guy who would not be pleased to be out on the town with you is nuts.
and
Hmm i think that comment was mine. I still don’t think you are obese, fuck what the BMI says, its a load of crap anyways. end of story.
There is more than one way to measure your weight and determine if its healthy for you. Try waist to hip – You still have a waist, its visible in your photos. Yes, you have fat, but you ARE NOT fat.
Okay, this is something that needs to be addressed. People keep telling me oh you’re not FAT, you’re not OBESE! I won’t argue that BMI is crap, I believe it is. But when the world uses that as their system to judge health, people need to see what the horrible monster known as obesity is. It’s not that I think I’m obese, it’s that according to the way the world impairs judgement on our bodies- I am obese. I am obese (should I say it five times fast?). Since I fail at explaining this as well as others, please refer to FillyJonk’s wonderful post here.
and quote:
This so-called epidemic is not made up of theoretical fucking people who are just as fat as you can possibly imagine. It’s made up of people you see every day AND WHO YOU PROBABLY THINK ARE “NOT FAT.” That’s the point of the BMI Project. That’s the point of the good work that Jezebel has, for the most part, been doing, making it clear that fear of fat is an injustice visited on all of us, of any shape. Jezzies seem to be okay hearing that from their thin editors — since we all know they’re really talking about thin girls, right, and it’s not okay for thin girls to have to think they’re fat! They might start to eat too little, which when you’re thin is called an eating disorder!
In fact, though, the difference between body shame for thin women and fat women is only one of scale. There’s not a magical cutoff where shame becomes healthy. There’s not a magical cutoff where bodies become unacceptable. There’s not a magical cutoff where weight loss pressure suddenly breaks free of patriarchy and societal scapegoating and becomes pure and beneficent concern for health. There’s only an arbitrary demographic cutoff where someone who was okay one pound ago becomes a statistic to scare children with.
And a lot of the people you think are “not fat“? They’re already past it.
Another post that I recently read and really loved was by Lesley over at Fatshionista.
So Miller handily brackets her own limits of where acceptable sizes should begin and end–it’s really no different than the current paradigm, it’s just moving the goalposts a bit–but she draws the line at “promoting obesity”. Of course. No one wants to promote obesity. Obese is, after all, one of the very worst things a person can be. To be Obese is to hate yourself, to allow your body to look that way, and to hate everyone else, to force them to see you in that shape. To be Obese is to be unsanitary, uneducated, unpleasant, and unhappy. To be Obese is to be unlikeable and more than that, unloveable. To be Obese is to be unacceptable.
The trouble, as Fillyjonk points out, is that many of us are obese, according to even the most forgiving definitions. I was legitimately obese as an eighth-grader, and I am legitimately–morbidly, even!–obese today. Truth be told I’m not sure there’s been a time since puberty that I was not obese, even at the apex of my compulsive-dieting and borderline eating-disordered teen years.
Today I can look back at my eighth grade self pictured above and think, Wow, I really wasn’t all that fat. Certainly not as fat as I thought I was. But the sharper truth is that even at the time, telling me I wasn’t fat wouldn’t have helped. Telling me I wasn’t fat would have done nothing to quell my insecurities, my gutter-level self-esteem, my passionate body hatred. Telling me I wasn’t fat, even if you told me every day, wouldn’t have changed a thing and it wouldn’t have made a dent. I knew I was fat, and the reality of it was irrelevant; I knew it, with all the certainty of my burgeoning adolescence. I knew. So telling me I wasn’t fat would not have helped, any more than it helps when anyone tells anyone they are not fat, when the person calling themselves fat really, truly believes in it.
What would have helped would have been someone telling me I was fine the way I was, fat or not. Or someone telling me being fat was not reason to hate myself, to starve myself, to hurt myself, to punish my body for failing to conform to the images in my head, or in the magazines I read. Or someone telling me being fat was not the end of my world, that it did not mean nobody would ever love me, or want to be my friend. Or even someone telling me, yes, even if you are Obese, you still deserve basic human respect. These are the things that would have helped; these are the things that may have saved me years of damage that then took additional years to repair. What was singularly unhelpful was being told I wasn’t fat in the first place, since that assertion did nothing to dismantle the idea that fat people richly deserve their ill treatment. Simply being identified as “not fat” meant the fear of becoming fat (or fatter) was allowed to remain solidly intact.
Okay, since I am a busy college student I must be rushing off to my class now! Hopefully I’ll update again lol!
Now I’ll try to remain normal…
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